How Atlas is paid.
Fixed scope, performance, or a combination — and why the second one changes which work we take.
Most firms are paid for effort. An agency bills for the hours it spends, and whether those hours produced anything is a separate conversation, usually a difficult one. We would rather be judged on the outcome, because that is the only thing a client actually wanted to buy.
An engagement is structured one of three ways. It can be fixed in scope — an agreed piece of work for an agreed figure, which is how most website and systems work is done. It can be tied to performance, where our economics move with the revenue we can be shown to have produced. Or it can be a combination, which in practice is the most common: a fixed figure for the build, and a performance arrangement on what the build goes on to generate.
Nothing about this is published as a price list. The terms depend on the scope, the opportunity, and how much of the outcome we can genuinely influence, and a rate card would only be honest for the engagements it happened to fit.
The part that matters is what it changes on our side. When we are paid on a result, an engagement we cannot move costs us real money, so we decline the ones we do not believe in — see why we decline work. It also means the reporting has to be defensible: every figure we invoice against traces back to a specific sale, through a chain we can both inspect. That is the whole reason the client dashboard exists in the form it does.